Interfictions 2 (7 page)

Julian's father built the house almost entirely from wood that came on a truck as a kit from Sears. Niklas Macek, a skilled carpenter, carefully fitted each piece to the other and nailed them square enough to travel eight hundred miles farther than any architect had ever imagined.

Fire scurries from joist to joist and beam to beam while the insulation smolders. Paint bubbles on the walls in streaks. Plaster crumbles and furniture flares. The house holds together.

Julian stares at the empty squares where the family portraits once hung. Mama died soon after the move. Anja and Maria left as soon as they could, marrying the first cretins they met, hoping to start better families than their own. Theodore ran away to the war, and Peter was spacey and silent the rest of his life. They're all dead now.

The house can't get away, even if it wanted to, not with fire to spread like typhoid anywhere it goes. It can't just die, either, not yet, not with Julian still mistaken.

The house inhales. Hot air flows up to the attic and cool air sucks in through the broken windows. It has no lungs or voice box, but the fire itself will have to do. Maybe a ten penny nail shrieks from two boards prying apart or expanding gases split an ancient rusted pipe; all the house knows is that it manages a single scream—one very much like Kathy Henderson's all those decades ago.

The difference is that someone hears it this time. Julian spins to his left and to his right, looking for the source. Was there someone still in the house? His worry clears his mind enough so he can race from room to room to find her.

Of course it is a
her
.

Unable to find anyone, Julian lopes outside and searches around the foundations. He bends to check the crawlspace, and glowing embers barely show the pipe, black and rusty and blood-stained. Can he see?

She crawled under after a cat, the house wants to explain. One of the calicos from Mrs. Pettyjohn's yard. She crawled under and cracked her head. She bled all over, and I couldn't stop it. I'm sorry. It happened so fast, too fast for a house.

Julian crawls backward to escape the crashing beams and soaring sparks, and the house wonders if he understands. Blood and mud and rust look a lot alike, after all. It's a long shot, much like coming all the way to Florida in the first place. Julian does look amazed, surprised, his eyes wide. He doesn't look as slumped and heavy, at least.

Relieved, it settles exhausted into the fire and sleeps.

"Remembrance Is Something Like a House” started as a crime tale with a supernatural element, a house crawling across the country to confront a murderer. I had a tough time finding the correct voice and point of view in the first few attempts, but everything changed when I said, “To hell with it. I wonder what would happen if I told it from the perspective of the house?” It was a strange, risky, and counterintuitive choice—one I couldn't have made earlier in my career when I was still scared to break rules.

If “Remembrance” is anything to go by, interstitial fiction is fiction that, regardless of the tropes and traditions involved, taps into universal emotions with a certain verve, awe, voice, enthusiasm, risk, and abandon—a tossing aside of normalcy in the brave pursuit of some aesthetic or thematic end. Interstitial stories tend not to care what genre they belong to, what traditions they confront or invent, what audience they find. Their writers have simply written with every tool they've got: robots, ghosts, creeping houses, whatever. They've held nothing back, even risking embarrassment or failure.

"Remembrance” is good only because I took a big, scary chance that it would be bad. Perhaps that is what makes interstitial fiction so powerful.

Will Ludwigsen

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Long-Term Memory

Cecil Castellucci

It had been forty-six years since Dunbar had visited the moon. He stood in his bathrobe at the scenic window taking in the view. The black sky, the craters, the landscape were exactly as he remembered.

He cursed.

Dunbar was a research scientist at McGill University. He thought it was funny that he was studying the biology of memory in Quebec, a province whose motto was “I remember.” He saw it everywhere on the license plates. “Je me souviens."

I remember.

Dunbar remembered many things from his past. He remembered his first telephone number. The number of steps from his front door to the playground two blocks over. The exact color of his shirt when he graduated from sixth grade. The words to the poem “Kubla Khan.” The way the first car he owned had to be finessed when he shifted from first to third.

Je me souviens.

Was the province worried that it would forget? What would it forget? Dunbar could find no clear answer.

He had come here to study memory so that he could learn how to forget.

"One interesting aspect of animal and human behavior is the ability to modify behavior by learning."

"There are two kinds of memory. There is declarative and procedural."

"The number of neurons in the brain is 10 to the power 10. Each neuron in the brain receives, on average, 2,000 to 20,000 synapses, or connections, from other neurons."

"Every human brain has the same general blueprint for organization, but the experiences that you have make every single brain unique."

Each semester, Dunbar told his students all of these things in his Intro to Neuroscience lecture. It was always the same lecture, because even if more and more was discovered about the mechanics of memory, the basics didn't change.

Each semester, the students were the same. They sat, sleepy eyed, scratching the words that he said into their notebooks or laptops, hoping that something that he said would be on the exam.

He wanted to tell them that there was no way to be sure that we remembered anything correctly; something would be lost, something would be discarded.

But in the end something would also be retained. Even if it was something that you wanted to be forgotten.

Slide 1: The Neuron

"The neurons in the brain produce action potentials. In other words, they secrete neurotransmitters to communicate with each other at the synapses. The chain of neurons creates various neural pathways. Some neural connections are stronger than others and they can be modulated, or changed, following learning or during behavioral modifications."

DUNBAR: How do you choose what you remember?

DUNBAR: Which pathway in my brain is the one that holds that memory?

DUNBAR: Scientifically, how do I answer this question?

Often, he asked himself these questions. All he knew was that the brain retained information if it was interesting and exciting. If it wasn't, then it would ignore it.

DUNBAR: But how do you choose?

No matter how much he knew about the mechanisms of memory, he could not pick and choose what he remembered. He could not forget what he wanted to forget. And Dunbar very much wanted to forget.

DUNBAR: How do you choose to forget?

1. First Memory

It was not a cage
, he thought.
It was a crib.

He was supposed to feel safe there; the mattress was soft. But the young Dunbar knew one thing. He wanted to get out. He pulled himself up by his tiny hands, using the bars to steady him. He used his small muscles to bring himself to the top of the bar. He teetered on the edge and then flung himself over and fell to the floor.

Once there, he felt pain. And so he began to scream.

His mother came into the room and picked him up.

His mother sat in her room. She was eighty-eight years old and she remembered nothing. Not even who he was.

"Who are you?” she asked.

"Dunbar,” he said.

"That's a terrible name,” she said. “You can bring me a (sandwich) (Coke) (sweater) (magazine)."

So he did.

He would sit there and have the same exact conversation with her twenty-two times before he would feel that he had done his duty as a loving son and finally leave the hospital.

He envied his mother. She could not remember all the pain that life had caused her. Not his angst-filled teenage years when he had tormented her with worry. Not the loss of her husband of forty-eight years, without whom she never imagined she could live.

Conveniently, all was forgotten, and she was happier than she'd ever been in her life.

Her brain had saved her from the pain of her past.

He thought that she was
lucky.

If he could suppress that one thing in his mind, the thing that his mind found so interesting and he found to be pure torture, then perhaps he could finally be happy, too.

Long-term memory. When the synaptic pathways are fluid and used, memory is easily accessible.

There were 241 students in the Intro to Neuroscience class, and one of them was a girl with long braids piled up on top of her head. He noticed her because she looked like Heidi, from the storybook. It bothered him when she came up to him after class and told him that her name was Heidi and that she had some questions, not because he did not want to answer the questions of an eager young mind, but because his bladder was full from the terrible coffee from the break room that he'd drunk all through the class, and now he had to urinate.

"I have a few questions,” Heidi said.

"Let's walk and talk,” Dunbar said. He was snapping the laptop bag closed and rushing to get out of there. Heidi followed him through the halls.

HEIDI: How do you choose what you remember?

DUNBAR: You cannot.

HEIDI: But how do you choose what is important or exciting, or to be discarded?

DUNBAR: You don't. Or, you can try to practice, to give certain ideas a better chance at consolidating in your memory, like when you study.

HEIDI: But you still might forget the thing you want to remember.

DUNBAR: Yes. It is possible.

HEIDI: But how do you make sure that you will?

DUNBAR: Is there something specific that you want to remember? Because the good news is that then you probably would find it interesting, and your pathways will take care of it on their own.

HEIDI: I want to remember Every Single Thing.

2. Second Memory

He had been making fried chicken in the deep fryer. Placing the pieces in, one by one. He was making dinner for his molecular biology study group. They were due at 6 PM and it was 5:50 by the digital clock on the stove. He was rushing to finish preparing the meal. He had come home late. The subway had been evacuated because of a strange smell, and he had had to take the bus, which was much slower.

There was something comforting about the methodical action of dipping the chicken into the oil, and as he got into the groove of it, his mind began to wander as though he were dreaming.

His mind swirled with a jumble of images cobbled together from the movements of his day. How he tied his shoe in the hall next to the water fountain. The lost glove he found outside the classroom. The piece of rhubarb pie he ate at lunch. The yellow of the ball he served in the tennis match against his thesis adviser.

Dunbar was dipping the next piece of chicken into the boiling oil when the doorbell jolted him out of his reverie. His study group had arrived.

But Dunbar screamed. He had stuck his whole hand into the fryer.

His study group kindly called 911.

Slide 2: Simple Reflex Experiment

The simple reflex in the snail
Aplysia
is a good example of the sorts of things that happen in our own brains when we learn things.

In the experiment, the withdrawal reflex of the snail is evoked, and the first response is big. Then, with repetition, the amplitude of the withdrawal reflex diminishes. If you record the activity of the motor neurons of the reflex, there is less excitation arriving to the neurons. As the reflex goes down, the excitation goes down, as well.